ENCUESTA DE LA IDENTIDAD ESTRUCTURAL

Two students come in discussing how many people they think will turn up to the seminar as it’s the last of the term. At 4pm two other students arrive, we all sit in silence waiting for the seminar leader to return.

After passing around the sign in sheet the seminar leader asks what was found in Phase 1, a student replies “NHS?”, the seminar leader agrees expanding saying “Yep, benefits and the welfare state”. She continues asking:

SL: What was going on with crime?

Student: By 1955 it started rising by 10% (Numbers as measures, with students making a fixed matter of fact statement)

SL: As it was quite stable up until then.

The seminar leader moves onto Phase 2 asking what happened to crime, a student responds saying that it became a “salient wedge in the manifestos and criticizing each other.”. (In this seminar group the students are much happier to answer questions.) The seminar leader agrees talking through that in 1981 there were the Brixton Riots and that crime was 50% higher in 1992 than it was in 1998. (Same phrased sentence quoting the statistics as used with the previous groups).

Next to me a student has opened up the lecture slides and is clicking through them. They consist of graphs and tables as well as text. The student says:

S: I think there was 3000-4000 new offences from 2000-2008.

The seminar leader explains that New Labour redefined the landscape, with PACE aiming to balance the system by actually rebalancing in favour of the victim, the exchange continues:

SL: What happened to prison numbers?

S: Under New Labour they were they highest they’d ever been. [Seminar leader passes around the printed question sheet] SL: What happened to crime during the 1950s to the 1980s? S: It rose.

SL: There was a slow increase – quantify it. During the 1980s crime shot through the roof, from the late 1990s crime decreased – why?

S: New economy and New Labour

SL: Yep, we’re used to rising crime now, it’s become the norm.

(Fieldnote: Criminology, 1st _{year UG seminar, Content module)}

Currently I’m doing another module […] and yeah that’s, we get assessed on our computer labs, so how well we handle statistics, and we also have coursework, which erm, is like a lab report where we have to find trends and explain the trend in crime frequencies over 100 years for sexual offenses and then we also have an exam.

(2nd _{year UG student describing the assessment of a 2}nd _{year UG content}

module, Criminology – Daisy) The coursework was about change in crime rates for two particular crimes [mhm] […]. It was kind of like interpretive. We had this data [mhm] and we had to make a graph out of it and we had to say why there’d been a change in the data.

(2nd _{year UG student describing the coursework assessment of a 2}nd _{year UG}

QM(s) module, Criminology – Genevieve) When entering the field of Criminology, it was impossible to overlook the dominance of trends of data, specifically, trends of crime rates. Numbers of victims, offenders,

prisoners, or reported offences acted as lenses through which to understand patterns and trends of crime. Unlike other disciplines where conditions were controlled, tested, and repeated, here patterns were linked to policy changes (often the dominant variable

changing). These trends were there to be carefully quantified, presented, and interpreted - a fact that was reinforced in the teaching practices and assessments, as seen in the quotes above.

However, instead of emphasis being placed on the process of producing ‘correct’ trends, students and staff were continually mindful of the ways in which statistics could be misused by the media (an issue gaining increasing attention through the growth of organisations such as Full Fact and statistical reporting courses provided by the RSS (2015)) and of the limitations inherent in crime survey data:

We’ve been challenging statements made with statistics, and trying to find research to back them up and all that kind of stuff, it’s impossible like, just so much of it seems to be a bit, erm, made up really. Erm, which is why I think the media is quite important, cus that’s how, before learning about this stuff, that’s how I got most of the information, and if the media isn’t showing, erm, the true

picture that Criminology research is finding, and it’s mainly based on qual- quantitative facts because they’re easier to pick out and sort of translate upwards, aren’t they? So I think that’s quite important.

(2nd _{year UG student, Criminology – Sarah)}

What they do is they learn to, erm, access data [mm]. They learn to work with data of various forms, […] they’re learning how to work with data, they’re also, in the lectures they’re getting a background as to what is, and what isn’t included in these crime figures […] they’re understanding where this data comes from, but then […] they’re starting to use their analytical skills to maybe understand why we’re seeing differences

(Staff member, Criminology - Doug) A sentiment that was reiterated by one module handbook:

(Criminology, UG 2nd _{year research methods module handbook)}

For Criminologists, these limitations, or what “isn’t included” as Doug described it, is of particular importance, with the term ‘dark figure’ being used to describe the number of crimes that are left out of official statistics. By labelling in this way what is effectively an unquantifiable error term, Criminologists reinforced a necessary scepticism towards QM(s). This constant interrogation of QM(s) is also of importance given the

as that from the Home Office, ONS, or the Crime Survey for England and Wales. With little control over the design of these surveys, emphasis shifted to the production of trends through time, descriptive statistics, and the representation of this data, through pie charts and line charts.

Although these techniques were understood by students as producing a shallower picture than qualitative methods, despite this and the aforementioned scepticism, QM(s) were still understood as valuable, as one student described:

It’s never going to give you a complete picture, but what it does give you is at least a starting point of trends. It’s better for trends really. [mhmm] Erm, and what police statistics show you really are, how many crimes were reported to the police [mhmm], not how many crimes happen. So they’re not completely useful, but not completely useless.

(2nd _{year UG student, Criminology – Daisy)}

While Criminology and Sociology are disciplines often characterised as having low QM(s) content (Williams et al., 2016; Williams et al., 2004) here QM(s) power to provide trends was relied upon across the degree. In focussing on this side of QM(s), students were taught to interrogate and cross-examine the statistics presented to them, understanding that QM(s) were used to make statements, and ultimately an argument, according to a specific dataset. As such, students acquired much higher levels of quantitative literacy (see Ben-Zvi and Garfield (2004) or Rumsey (2002)) or thinking skills (as used by delMas (2002)) than seen in other disciplines. Overall, QM(s) here were fluid and changing depending on the data, speaker, and occasion, providing partial indicators not fixed truths.